View source for Printable Characters and Hexadecimal Output from the tools

{{GoodAnswer}}

== Question ==

When I do an snmp walk on part of the
mib space, some objects that normally return a string type are instead
returning hexadecimal characters, yet they identify the oid type as
string instead of hex string.

== Answer ==

SNMP only has one type of data for strings, OCTET STRINGs is the SMI data type for sending strings through the SNMP protocol.  It's Net-SNMP that decides whether to print a string as a human-formatted string or a hexadecimal string.  And, in turn, Net-SNMP leaves that decision up to the system.

== Making Strings Human Readable ==

The Net-SNMP tools all decide whether or not to print a character in a string directly to the output stream based on whether that character passes the system's isprint() test.  Specifically, this means that whether or not the tools decide a character is printable is determined by your locale settings and what your default language is.

If you are seeing hexadecimal strings when you would like to see human-readable strings, you need to identify which characters are causing the issue and convince your system that they are printable.

== Forcing Hexadecimal Display ==

hmm...  how come the -Ox and -Oa options aren't working?

Possible answer: <code>-Ox</code> and <code>-Oa</code> do not override the DISPLAY-HINT if there is one.  Try adding <code>-Ih</code> which disables the use of DISPLAY-HINT information: [[User:Quester|Quester]] ([[User talk:Quester|talk]])

[[Category:Applications]]
[[Category:Output]]